4. BENEFITS/HR IT SUPPORT/STAFF DEVELOPMENT UNITS (reference
Table 4). (This is followed by two paragraphs; the first explains how
HR has taken over many functions previously performed by HSS; the
second paragraph explains how the benefits unit is adversely impacted
by the HSS (medical), Kcares (dental), and SFCCD (PeopleSoft) systems.)

Example: Earth Sciences

After 3-4 weeks of registration this year, GOG 1 had received 191
closed notices. 39% of those who attempted to register received a
closed notice for Spring 2010. However, this number does not include #
of students who didn’t try to register because course was listed as
closed. We face similar problems in GEOG 1L (20% received closed
notice), and OCAN 1 (10% received closed notice) and 1L (14% received
closed notice), and GEOL 10 (10% received closed notice), and 10L (10%
received closed notice). All our course preregistered full. Our
enrollments are overflowing. We have a number of impacted classes and
need to be able to add more units.

The data also show that our department has grown steadily over the
last few years---and could grow even more if additional sections are
made available to us, especially Physical Geography lectures and labs.
Our measure of “Productivity”—although a crude indicator of
efficiency—reflects our large average class size even when our
laboratory sections are averaged in with our lecture sections. We have
been limited by our ability to offer specialty classes (such as
climate change and environmental geology), yet still not satisfied the
overall student need in the core programs. It also forces us to admit
40 students to lab classes, when the rooms comfortably fit only 35 or
less, and field-oriented lab classes lose their effectiveness when
class size is so large. In fact, as a whole, we’ve been upping the
numbers of students admitted to our classes to handle the large
enrollment pressure, but we’d rather be able to offer more
smaller-sized classes which is what we feel a community college is all about.

We also notice from the data that our students are generally on the
younger side (relative to the CCSF average) with slightly more white
students than the average. Our student success data show that we
struggle, as does the rest of the college, with the lowest
performances associated with certain target ethnicities (African
American, Filipino, and Hispanic/Latino). We continue as a department
to develop strategies to improve the performance of all our students
and hope that these will help to decrease the achievement gap. In
fact, you will notice from our data that performance has been steadily
improving for the past 5 years. We credit our mentoring program and
study halls as the major source of this improvement.